Caucasian [C-arm] female [fluoroscopy]. I'm always wondering about homophones and dictation software. I imagine that with the rise of computerized dictation this is going to happen more and more often. Funny and scary at the same time.

I'm a transcriptionist and wonder if they used incorrect shortcut keys for whatever was dictated, or it could have been produce by speech recoginition software and not caught by the dictator or the editor. I work for a group of orthopedists and occasionally play their dictation bloopers back to them at their Christmas party with commentary.

It has all of the telltale signs of an expander mistake by an MT - a "dragonism," if you will. I use "cauc" for Caucasian. I'm sure the MT messed up the Caucasian female expander with the C-arm fluoroscopy one.

I've seen CAF for "Chinese-American female", so something like that is my guess ... my favorite, though, is my partner's dictation that said the patient was allergic to "steel bananas". We have no idea what she actually said.

I think there's a good chance Pink is right, but it's equally likely to be a speech recognition hiccup. I love seeing docs notice stuff like this in charts-- it serves as a reminder to take SR software vendors' accuracy statistics with a pretty big lump o' salt. More fun with transcription/SR bloopers here. . . .Yeah, that was a bit of shameless blog-whoring. =)

I said the sentence aloud and it seems to me (if the voice recognition software tries to match words based on the first syllable) the phrase could have been "senior citizen." 'C-arm' could sound line 'senior' to a computer, and 'flouroscopy' would be the next logical word to follow (again, to a computer).

The next words in the sentence, "who looks stated age," would then make sense. If I am right, the sentence would be a bit redundant.

At my office, we were filing an brief with the appellate court. The public prosecutor was filing an amicus curiae brief. They needed an extension in which to file their brief. They filed a request for an extension with that court. In that request, they identified themselves as the public prosecutor. It became obvious that they did not proof the request for extension but simply did a spell check which would not have picked up the very funny typo. They left out the "L" in the word "public." We had a lot of fun and a very good laugh at their expense as they identified themselves as the "pubic prosecutor" and filed that with the appeals court.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

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